Researcher Saloni Bhatia has examined the role of religion on people’s attitudes toward snow leopards and wolves. She didn’t find significant differences between Muslims’ and Buddhists’ tolerance for these predators. Overall, the conservation impact of religion seems to be limited – but not insignificant.
Amarsaikhan is a herder in the Tost Mountains of Mongolia. Everyone here calls him Amara. He has spent his entire life living alongside the elusive snow leopard – not seeing the cat very often, but feeling its presence much more frequently than he’d have cared for. Every year, snow leopards killed several of his horses and fawns—an expense he and his community could hardly withstand. Amara not only feared these cats – “to be honest, I think I hated them”, he says. On several occasions, he attempted to kill snow leopards that had come near his camp. Luckily, he never succeeded.
Snow leopards are notoriously difficult to monitor, in part because they reside in remote areas with unfriendly terrain. But they aren’t the only ones who live there.
Ajay Bijoor, a project associate in our India team, has written a wonderful article about his experiences with the management of feral dogs in the Transhimalayan landscape of Spiti, India. We’re reposting it here with the kind permission of Ajay and Current Conservation magazine.
Feral dogs have been seen chasing snow leopards and bears away from their prey. Growing populations of free-ranging dogs are becoming a real threat to wildlife in many parts of the snow leopard’s range. Liu Mingyu, a researcher in China, is tracking dogs with GPS collars to better understand their behavior – and eventually address the threat they pose.
In our eco-camps, school kids in snow leopard habitat learn to reconnect to nature. The program has been a success in India and Mongolia for many years. Next year, we’re planning to launch eco-camps in Kyrgyzstan as well – so our Kyrgyz team visited a camp in Spiti, India, to learn from their colleague’s experience.
Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park, Mongolia’s largest protected area, is home to the endangered snow leopard and many other rare species. The Snow Leopard Trust has been partnering with the park for six years, training and equipping rangers for conservation and research. This week, the park celebrated its 20th anniversary.
One year after devastating flash floods washed away their livelihoods, dozens of families in our conservation partner communities in Pakistan’s Chitral district have been able to rebuild their lives – thanks to the generosity of Snow Leopard Trust supporters.
The Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle (where our operations office is located) was filled with the delicious smell of homemade sweet treats last Friday. Two local teenagers, Theo Perlin and Ina Megalli, were holding a bake sale to benefit snow leopard conservation!
It was in the thick of winter when Samat and his wife Shirin first started washing the coarse, rather dirty wool of their dozen or so sheep in front of their modest house in Ak-Shiyrak village, a community high up in the Kyrgyz Tian-Shan mountains. In the freezing cold, the pair were outside, elbow-deep in …
